1. Field
The present disclosure relates to network design. More specifically, the present disclosure relates to a method and system for provisioning connectivity for different traffic types between different data centers.
2. Related Art
The relentless growth of the Internet has brought with it an insatiable demand for bandwidth. As a result, equipment vendors race to build larger, faster, and more versatile switches to move traffic. However, the size of a switch cannot grow infinitely. It is limited by physical space, power consumption, and design complexity, to name a few factors. More importantly, because an overly large system often does not provide economy of scale due to its complexity, simply increasing the size and throughput of a switch may prove economically unviable due to the increased per-port cost.
Another challenge service providers are facing is the increasing traffic demand between data centers. Interconnecting data centers via wide-area network (WAN) infrastructure to provide backup for storage services is of critical importance, especially for disaster recovery. In addition, the advent of virtualization technology has made it a requirement for service providers to be able to move a virtual machine across data centers (often referred to virtual-machine (VM) mobility). However, the current solutions address VM mobility and storage-service transport between data centers separately. In other words, service providers need to purchase separate network equipment to facilitate VM mobility and storage-service transport between two data centers. Such solutions inevitably increase both the capital expenditure (CAPEX) and operational expenditure (OPEX) for the service provider.